Learn how to communicate more effectively at work and achieve your goals. Taught by award-winning Wharton professor and best-selling author Maurice Schweitzer, Improving Communications Skills is an essential course designed to give you both the tools you need to improve your communication skills, and the most successful strategies for using them to your advantage. You'll learn how to discover if someone is lying (and how to react if they are), how to develop trust, the best method of communication for negotiation, and how to apologize. You'll also learn when to cooperate and when to compete, how to create persuasive messages, ask thoughtful questions, engage in active listening, and choose the right medium (face-to-face conversation, video conference, phone call, or email) for your messages. By the end of the course, you'll be able to understand what others want, respond strategically to their wants and needs, craft convincing and clear messages, and develop the critical communication skills you need to get ahead in business and in life.

OW

I did really enjoy the course. I gave a different perspective on situations and personal behaviour. The approach was very effective and the knowledge sticks in your mind. Very good.

AP

May 15, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Professor Maurice Schweitzer is obviously an expert in this field, and it was great to be able to learn from him. Course was very useful and thoughtfully presented.\n\nThank you!

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Cooperation, Competition, and Comparisons

In this module, you'll learn when to compete and when to cooperate to achieve success. You’ll explore the three key principles of cooperation and competition: scarcity, sociability and dynamic instability, and learn how to determine which approach to use based on your situation. You'll also discover how to use comparisons to provide motivation, and how to avoid "invidious" comparisons which can lead to discouragement or unethical behavior. By the end of this module, you'll be able to attain a better balance between competitive motivation and cooperative satisfaction to make your interactions more productive and successful.

Преподаватели

Maurice Schweitzer

Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions

Текст видео

I want to think about three principles that causes to shift between cooperation and competition. They transform us from friends to foes and back again. So, we think about the inner play of these three principles. The first principle is scarcity. The resources in our environment can either be scarce or plentiful, and that's what drives us from friend to foe. We think about scarcity and this is exactly what happened in Thanksgiving. So Thanksgiving, with this feast, we have abundant resources. And we are celebrating a cooperative event. But then we go out into the marketplace and these scarce deals cause us to compete fiercely for these scarce resources of low priced TVs and other things. Now we see scarcity not just in humans shifting us between cooperation and competition. But in size of animals we see the same thing. A study of grevy zebras found that the zebras actually behave differently as a function of how much water was available in their environment. When water was abundant, they formed one type of collectives and when water was scare, they formed a very different kind of collective. There's their social relationships shifted dramatically as a function of how scare this very precious water resource was. Now the second principle is how social we are. We're inherently social beings. We crave companionship. In fact, one of the worst forms of punishment in solitary confinement. After just a few days the human mind begins to decay in solitary confinement, people experience hallucinations, spasms of anger, malaise and apathy. We both crave human contact after being in solitary confinement, and we're also unfit for it. The human mind needs to be socially connected. The third principle is dynamic instability. The world around us is stochastic. It changes. It's unstable. Just like the stock market, things are shifting all around us and we need to quickly change and pivot between cooperation and competition. So this unstable and dynamic world, as we learn new information, we try to gather new information, it causes us to both cooperate and compete. And it's really the interplay between these three principles. Scarcity, the sociability and dynamic instability that causes to pivot back and forth between cooperation and competition. And sometimes we're engaging in both at the same time and we need to find our balance as both competitors and collaborators.